Is Rei Kawakubo calling for a revolution? Or just illustrating, in a conceptual ritual of flowery circumstance, that luxury fashion has reached such a pinnacle of decadence that it must be in for a fall? Granted, neither of those readings might be immediately apparent simply by looking at the exaggerated carnival procession of multiple rose-patterned jacquards, amalgams of upholstery and corsetry, flounces and furbelows, abstract armor, sugar-pink rubber frills, and bondage straps that walked in the Comme des Garçons show. But then there were her words: She was “imagining punks in the 18th century, which was a time of so many revolutions.”

Kawakubo’s runway collections started contradicting any notion that they might be literally “ready-to-wear” a long time ago. Instead, she uses her space, and the attention of her audience, to hint and disturb. She is, after all, showing in the capital of France, and here she was, using materials associated with the riches of Versailles, and building them into 3-D structures of gilded rose-strewn furnishing fabrics. Among these portable excrescences there were shapes reminiscent of pannier skirts, corsets, stomachers, and many suggestions of articulated armor. The whole thing was set off with black, skewwhiff 18th-century gentlemen’s wigs. The “punks”? An un-missable presence in powder-pink patent and vinyl.